Why I hate Catcher in The Rye

The rain has lashed down consistently today, so much so, that I became so sick of getting wet, I had a fit of peak and spent a dry afternoon watching a film at theatre Clwyd! Hummmm, Awaydays (2009) was not the best choice I could have made, but it it was the only film on offer

Now I have never got on with teenage angst! Even when I was a teenager in the 1970s, I couldn't quite identify with the morose Holden Caufield in the dire and dark The Catcher in the Rye,(a novel we were forced to read in 5th form English)

The reason for this was simply that I was not an unhappy angst ridden youth! Sure I was a bit of a geek and certainly I was lonely from time to time, but I always preferred living in a sunny fantasy world of film where I was always on hand to help Carol Lynley climb up the 18 foot ornamental Christmas Tree in the Poseidon Adventure or indeed tie myself down to the Promenade Room railings alongside Fred Astaire in the Towering Inferno!.......................when I wasn't watching and re watching Movies I was playing with my tropical fish......There was no time for teenage navel gazing...not if you were as interesting as I was !!!

So Awaydays proved to be a big disappointment for me! as it did echo those dismal,monochrome days of JD Salinger's novel. The film is an uneven account of the difficulties of growing up in Birkenhead in 1979. Working class lad, Carty wants to be dead hard. He gets into football violence, head buts gay shop assistants, and craves to be a part of the local youth gang. His best mate, Elvis does lots of drugs and is secretly gay. He fancies Carty and is deeply jealous of any women in his life. But as Carty moves forward in his life, Elvis starts to flounder.
Director Pat Holden obviously has a limited budget to film this rites of passage piece, and as the dirge of Joy Division belts out, the football violence scenes show this fact rather too depressingly. Sadly the whole film is a bit of a mess to be honest, but it is almost saved by the complex, magnetic core character of Elvis played with confidence and skill by Liam Boyle, he and he alone is worth the price of the cinema ticket. 4/10

The rain belted down as I drove back to Trelawnyd, and to be honest I wished I had watched something more frothy as the whole afternoon depressed me!
It was nice to get back home to some warmth, and a huge noisy doggy welcome